https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_2iSJpjoTAQ
Oh So gross something John it’s so good to see you. It’s great to see you, right? I haven’t had a chance to see I’m here But I’ve been so busy. I want to see the one the Conversation between you and Jonathan Jonathan pageau looks like yeah looks like it’s a really rich one So I’ll try to get to that very soon I’m really looking forward to your response and Paul just posted that you know Wants to make a four-hour video about it It’s the response to it’s been amazing like We Yeah It’s got four and a half thousand views four point six thousand views Like the normal for the channel and in that period of time is about 400 right? That’s really good That’s and it’s sort of continuing to increase in the number of views. It’s getting over a period of time So we just released another podcast on Monday and that podcast got 170 views in 48 hours And over the same 48 hours the pageau podcast got 748 and the next day was a thousand and then the next day the next 40 hour period was 1.2 So now it’s now it’s only 1.1, but That’s kind of it’s it’s interesting. I haven’t had a podcast sort of go viral like that before Before right like where it’s way outside the scope of everything else we do right right right that’s really cool. It’s really cool Yeah, that’s been cool And I think it was really productive and we’ve had like 70 comments on it people are really really pleased with it Feel like it was Did a good job of what I set out to do I guess So did it build on the you know discussions you had with Paul and the discussion you had with Paul and myself? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean I mean with Really clear goal around kind of trying to bridge the worldview and trying to get clarity around epistemology and and some of these other questions and To do some of the things that I think that I’m rationality rules and Adam friended were trying to do but do it Without making the mistake of assuming What the Jonathan was actually operating with our frame and it just you know, just a weird way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and also underestimating him Yeah I’m just gonna check something. There might be a slight glitch here. No, that should be fun. I Just want to make sure I’m on 5g because lately it’s been better than the standard No here. So I just wanted to make sure so what would you like to talk to I read the Scott Alexander essay and I’ve been reading a ton of stuff and reviewing stuff in preparation I’m not quite sure what you’d like to talk about and if it Connections also to what you talked to Jonathan about I’m happy to explore those Yeah, I mean I have a really specific agenda. So we’ll get to that in a second But I also I wanted to tell you this is just kind of not not intended for the podcast But I was really excited about this this morning at a conversation with Duarte Arroyo so I gave a presentation for For the sport movement conference put on by Shawn Mishka Shawn Mishka is the primarily populizer of Ecological dynamics approach within the team sport world he works with you know Athletes like Adrian Peterson is the best NFL running back in the last 20 years 30 years So he invited me to speak this year and so I give a presentation on how the development of parkour and MMA both reflect a kind of ecological dynamics approach to To motor learning and why they reveal their lessons about that. It was extremely well received Excellent. So one of the papers I cited was a paper on on the Brazilian game of pilata or pickup street soccer Duarte Arroyo was one of the authors on and he reached out to me and wanted to have a chat and so this morning I had a chat with him and he’s Yeah, he might want to invite me out to the University of Lisbon to Do some sort of consulting on a project. That’s great. That’s great. That’s very Happy for you. Yeah, I was very excited about it I mentioned you and talked about your four piece of knowing and how they overlap with some of the ecological dynamic stuff I really would love to chat with you about the differences between sort of the cog sigh approach versus ecological psychology approach at some point Sure, you know that Probably next conversation. Okay Yeah, my colleague. Well, he’s no longer my colleague. He’s no longer at UC but Dan Dolderman was sort of overlapping with ecological He did sort of ecological psychology and positive psychology and then we overlapped in quite a few domains. So I have some Have some experience not with ecological psychology, but with dialoguing with people from that psychology Yeah, but I mean you’re you said that one of your main mentors was one of Gibson’s direct students, right? Oh, yes John John Kennedy. Yeah very much. So it’s interesting to me because I’ve I haven’t really studied ecological Psychology directly I I know it via you and via Peterson, right and And yet I seem to understand it well enough that People within ecological psychology or a planet to motor learning find my ability to articulate it really compelling and valuable That’s good. It’s good That’s very good So yeah, he said it, you know, you love the way that I articulated it and just was really impressed by it. So So I was just that was really exciting for me to start finding people in the scientific community picking up my work and then seeing it So there you go So I want to share that with you. The other thing I want to share with you is I think Like five of the people are coming to the autumn retreat are all found me directly through through your work Good. Good. Well, yeah, I talk about you constantly I thought about you constantly. Thank you. So Yeah, it just feels like I’m just really happy today because it feels like the the niche that I sit in as a communicator practitioner of movement and sort of interpreter of science is Seemingly being picked up and a value to a lot of people and that makes me feel really happy Glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear that steal the culture. Yes So John is my official welcome to the evolve me play podcast for who knows how many of the time So today we’re gonna dialogue about something that that I think is one of a sort of a contention point between our two worldviews and Something that we’ve touched on a few times, but I haven’t wanted to dig deep into because I thought it sure really did a deep treatment, so I The question that we’re really looking at today is postmodernism and then You know, we’ll see what else comes out of it, but okay, okay, I figured I’d start with a question which is What is the role of postmodernism in the meeting crisis from your perspective? um, so I Mean the problem I’ve been struggling to try and treat this respectfully. I’m very critical of training postmodernism. That’s a unified thing Like and I haven’t read all of the postmodernists I’ve read three I’ve read Rorty And taking some courses on wordy read there dot deeply sort of reflected on there a little bit of pico and just getting into pico now and even between those three there’s very significant difference and I and I I sort of Don’t really like rorty. I I find Derrida very thought-provoking ambivalent towards and I kind of really like pico in certain areas, especially the late pico When he was talked when he was doing the technologies of the self and he gets into a discussion with Pierre Haddow which many people are completely unaware of and so I Want to hesitate around that and what I was looking I was looking through some of the literature and I was reading I’m reading probably the best book I’ve read in my life on Plato By David Schindler, it’s called Plato’s critique of pure reason of impure reason You can’t be reason Brilliant book and it represents the summation of all this brilliant scholarship that’s gone on in the last 15 years And he said the one thing that seems to unite all the postmodernists Is that their common rejection of Plato and Plato’s conception of truth that seems to be the only thing And I think The role they play The role they can play I don’t want to know that I don’t want to attribute intention to them They might even dislike me doing that but the role they can play for me and other people interested Is the way in which they challenged a certain? interpretation of Plato That was given in modernity during the the Enlightenment and Possibly liberated us from it Now I think all the current scholarship Schindler is one example Gonzales, there’s a this huge list Current scholarship has basically picked up on this and produced a fundamentally new interpretation of Plato And that that new interpretation is really driving and affording and motivating my current project work to work on after Socrates and the work on dia logos and dialectic So I appreciate This does not mean without criticism, but I appreciate the way postmodernism helped to afford this transformation Of the take we can have on Socrates and Socratic platonic dialogue And I think that mean take is highly germane to responding to the meaning crisis So that’s why I’m a little bit hesitant to villainize the postmodernists Because I think this function Is very important second point. So that’s one second There’s one way of reading at least reading Derrida He’s the one that I know the best sort of Derrida and and Heidegger because in many ways Heidegger is the postmodernist He’s also the existentialist. He’s just yeah But he’s what people forget is he’s also the er 4e cognitive scientist In fact, originally the 40 cognitive scientists labeled themselves the neoheideggerians So there’s a big there’s a big move in there and what you see I can see a lot of similarities for example between Dreyfus and Derrida in the criticism of thought as computation So Derrida’s model of what I would call computation is to serve linguistics, which is very much the model Language as a formal system. So sir uses the same Metaphor languages like chess etc. And I I like many neoheideggerians for e-cognitive scientists And so postmodernism is also a criticism of that model of cognition so I See postmodernism as convergent with a critique within cognitive science But also inspired by Heidegger and aspects of postmodernism And so I see postmodernism as a critical part of the postmodernism And so I see postmodernism as a critical part of the postmodernism Science but also inspired by Heidegger and aspects of postmodernism That gets us to what you might call a post computational model which Cognition which really opens us up again to what do we mean by me? What’s its connection to life and embeddedness and an action all the four e’s? And then on the other side, like I said, and these two are related The the affordance of this new interpretation they didn’t give it but they made it very possible this new interpretation of plato Which is I think far less anachronistic And that has opened up for me A capacity for making use of platonic Or socratic platonic dialogue as a model for our current theologos So for me, those are two very important legacies that I think should be properly appreciated Okay So I’d like to kind of put a pin in In the new interpretation of a plato and what you’re getting out of that because I think we could articulate that more deeply But I want to come back to that. Okay So I did a lot of research in preparation for this sort of digging into What was there a die actually saying what was fucco actually saying I didn’t look into badriard and leotard and lacan But I looked into those specific thinkers and I looked at at post-modernism as a sort of more general phenomenon and sure and how I interact with it so There’s a I mean, there’s a lot of problems in in in articulating this right? Once we get into it the the the details start becoming quite devilish but yes. Yes. Yes but um You know peterson makes the argument that that large sections of the jordan pierce makes the argument the large second sections of the academy are taken over by what he calls post-modern neomarxis and that this has resulted in a sort of ideological conformity and myop myopoeia, which is very dangerous and resulting in in bad scholarship and bad activism really And that looks true to me and I think that we can we can question to what degree those that that phenomenon is directly attributable to the thoughts of the Specific post-modern thinkers and still recognize that the phenomenon exists Yeah, I also I also did a lot of listening of james lindsey who controversial figure but I think that there’s some value and insight in his analysis of these thinkers and You know he He basically ends up, you know initially say being skeptical of peterson’s model and then he reads kimberly crenshaw And he reads angela davis Who are kind of at the beginning of critical race theory and says actually you can really directly track these people to to You know, I think it’s angela davis is a student of herbert marcus marcus is a student of the frankfurt school It comes out of critical theory, right they cite fukko and derrida They’re clearly influenced. They’re using the They’re using something that comes out of these schools of thought As their operating system and it results in in this activism and so I wanted to kind of Go back for a second and Give you the naive version of my take on post-modernism before we go into the more because I think I think it’s maybe Emblematic of how a lot of people have gone through this or started to experience it And why people might be really negative towards post-modernism without having actually read the thinkers That’s fair. I get and I’m not I want to be clear. I’m not denying Those historical legacies what i’m denying is the exhaustiveness Of those historical legacies i’m pointing to two other ones that I think are powerfully important and efficacious They’re not being noted as much perhaps by jordan Um, and you know, and I presented this idea to him directly. Yeah and so um I I’m not trying to defend them in the sense of well, I think they’re ultimately right or anything like that. I’m trying Which there’s two projects and I don’t want them to get confused. One is are they right? And then one is right? And that’s a that’s a that’s a that’s a Question we might never get to the answer that but the other question is well, what’s the best historical interpretation? Of what’s going on there? And so what i’m trying to do right now is address the second point Yeah, so um, I guess the way I see it is there’s there’s There’s the thinkers who are associated with post-modernism Yeah, and the the potential insight or value in what they actually said And then there is the historical phenomenon of how post-modern and played itself out post-modernism played itself out And and those two things they you have to you have to look at both right like in the bible it says judge a tree by its fruits sure and and I would say that That there’s some fruits of post-modernism that look pretty pretty damning at this stage And there may be also fruits that are that are much more redemptive but But through my own experience i’ve been much more impacted by the negatives So Yeah, let me present your it’s been interesting to kind of go back and think a lot about my own intellectual history as i’ve been preparing for this conversation, but So I think you might have heard me talk about this but um You know dyslexic adhd pulled out of school. Yeah had a mentor took over my education and uh read the lord of the rings lord of the rings changes my life And through the lord of the rings I became interested in mythology So I started reading the greek norse myths and then we get into greek and roman history and then celtic history and celtic Mythology um and then just anthropology in general. So I go to the local library uh when I was I think starting at 11 or 12 years old And I remember first they had these like big glossy beautiful like picture books of anthropology with short descriptions of You know the the Um the embutti pygmy and the messiah and the dinka and the giovante, you know, right, you know yanamami So that was like my first but somehow it’s kind of an interesting thing. They had like all of carlton coon’s work, right? Do you know carlton coon is no carlton coon is like the last major figure in I think pre world war two Uh physical anthropology like measuring skulls. Yeah. Yeah And he so he he becomes the devil after After world war two because all that skull measuring is associated with the nazis of course, right? And he you know, he he says that, you know different racial groups have different cranium sizes He’s he doesn’t really say he doesn’t he’s not he doesn’t make a normative case about anything He just says a few things that can be interpreted as racist and he probably was slightly racist given the time, right? Yeah. Yeah But then we have this move in in in anthropology of post structuralism and post positivism and and and pots not people right people don’t move around And so all everything of that physical anthropology is is sort of rejected and viewed as debunked but what’s really interesting to me is that if you go back and read coon’s description of the process of uh, indoeuropeanization indoeuropeanization of europe It’s actually Surprisingly Congruent with the newest genetic data that’s come out, right? Right Right. It’s very interesting because there’s this um, you know, there’s this nordicist tradition of the arian race starting in northern europe and and that’s where the indoeuropeans come from and they’re all blonde and uh, and interestingly coon basically says That that um, the early indoeuropeans were mediterranean in physical appearance And then that you see them kind of spread into the east and then they hybridize with with um with What I think he calls them like chrome anion types, which turns out to be inaccurate but but essentially He maps how this happens and it looks very much like what happens with essentially the hybridization of Of iranian farmers moving up into the baltic steppes um baltic aspen step mixing with um caucasian hunter-gatherers and then eventually mixing with um With the early european farmers and baltic hunter-gatherers, right? so anyways, my point is that These were big books and I was reading them when I was 13 14 years old. I had a big influence on me I was very interested in physical anthropology so then I got access to um a local there was a my mentor found another guy peter browning who was a an anthropologist in local government who had a library of Anthropology texts for me. And so I started picking up and reading ethnographies of like the embuti pygmy and the ebo and um The yanomami and all that like at that age when I was 14 15 years old And and started anthropology, right and then I got into um Uh marvin harris’s work in community college So then I showed up at a university and And essentially all of that stuff was viewed as like evil, right Everything was cultural relativism, right? If you if you didn’t think if you were willing to say that a clitoridectomy was wrong like that was viewed as sort of You know Not that you know, not that enlightened right? I see Is this during the same period that crisis in ethnography was going on? So I um When I was in grad school, I did quite a bit of anthropology and the focal thing there was the crisis in ethnography As a method. Yeah, I don’t remember precisely. I just remember that that that I I didn’t understand the perspective that I was coming into when I came into university All right, everything that I learned about anthropology From studying my own was sort of not not um, you know Current anymore Right. Well i’m just comparing when I when I when I encountered this stuff in I didn’t I did when I was in my carps I did undergraduate work in anthropology and I started encountering this stuff and then And then when I was in grad school, I was doing grad school anthropology. That’s one of my breadth characteristic requirements Um, and that’s that’s when I was encountering darada and that’s when I started reading darada in depth in response to that So we have somewhat similar histories. Yeah so so anyways, so I remember I started to have this sense that That within anthropology, I also read um, jared diamond around that time, you know guns, germs and steel and The general response within the anthropology community was very negative towards that and towards marvin harris as well And his sort of general synthetic theories of cultural materialism And certainly like all the physical anthropology and socio-biology evolutionary ecology was all viewed as as completely Um Ideologically incorrect. Yeah, and and I started to have the sense that there was just no interest in understanding In understanding how things actually worked right it was like it was always about particularism and never about Trying to to to see some sort of broad overarching Lesson that you can learn. I remember taking a class called sex and gender and culture Which I was quite interested in and uh And the entire class was on third genders there was no section in the entire class on how male and female normative Behavior differed from culture to culture right, right and I went up to the teacher and I and I told her like 99 of your students are going to be Cisgendered male or cisgender female we didn’t use that terminology in 2000, but the basics have it right um Wouldn’t it be valuable to them to have a a cross-cultural lens on what that looks like Yeah, and and she didn’t have an answer for me. She just looked at me like Like I was, you know an alien So so then when I um Um, so then we had one teacher jones stevenson, uh, and uh, she co-taught a class on on uh Evolution of psychology and sociology with the biology department So I took that class and was like, oh my god Here are people who are actually trying to understand human nature people who have dense Empirical basis to describe what they’re doing Whose whose models actually map to the real world that i’m experiencing I remember before I took that class it was one of my good friends was taking that class with me and he asked me What it was about and I was like What I told him was This guy, io wilson Studied ants and thought he could apply their uh, his findings on ants to humans, which is totally ridiculous But i’m gonna take the class anyways Right that was the attitude that I had been indoctrinated into at that point right, and then it completely blew my mind when I encountered that and so eventually like I I was sort of just You know completely appalled by what had happened with anthropology I thought it was a discipline that had completely rotted from the inside and this was in 2000 So I left and I I had three Three credits left to finish my degree and I never finished it because I just thought that cultural anthropology was just Was just completely useless right And and at that time I had started coaching gymnastics and realized that I loved being a coach and you know that ended up being productive for me, but um So not long after that I read Steven Pinker’s book the blank slate, right? Relays out the idea of the standard social science model and I was like, okay That’s what we were learning in all these other classes right why that came about and that that book was extremely compelling and powerful for me, so that’s where my kind of perspective on post-modernism came from and so then over the years i’ve seen Those same sort of talking points that I feel like you learned in sociology and anthropology 101 Propagate themselves through the entire sort of social sphere to the point where you meet people who will say that the reason that men are taller than women is because of social construction because we don’t feed little girls enough protein because of Um, you know entrenched systematic sexism and patriarchy And and that’s the kind of legacy that i’ve that i’ve seen from from post-modernism then as i’ve seen the rise of the culture war You know, i’ve seen this incredibly toxic Way of of of using relativism to to drive, you know to Like peter bergosian talks about idea laundering, you know Post-modernism is used to sort of use the citation circle where nothing is ever empirically tested to launder an idea and You know put it out there and and so we have ideas like You know that sex is is a is a is a spectrum, right? um You know, there’s lots of different sexism the idea of biological sex is socially constructed. That’s now a widely held idea you know and You can track that to ann foster sterling and see that she basically just completely manipulates the data and falsely represents it in order to to find You know in order to to to achieve an ideological And so this is the legacy of post-modernism from my perspective and and I think you know Like I feel like since you and I have started having a conversation in the last couple of years I think you can see that the craziness has accelerated really intensely Would you agree with that? uh I think so. I mean, i’m not quite sure what you’re pointing to with the craziness, but I think we’re pointing to the same thing I would agree with yeah. Yeah I mean, I think it’s on both sides of the aisle, but this this rejection of biology the reaction rejection of denial the the um The policing of ideological conformity Cancel culture and again, that’s on both sides of the aisle like that has gotten substantially worse and I think you’re seeing it um You know at every at every level of academia in the big tech companies you’re seeing it in schools You know like we one of the reasons why we wanted to move out of seattle was in order to basically get our kids out of Um out of the seattle school district because you know their equity diversity and inclusion Programming is is so is so So overarching it’s so much the primary focus of it and it’s so So unbalanced in the way that it’s presented that it just seems incredibly toxic to children And we didn’t want to have part of that and I don’t know if you’ve looked at like what’s happening with Uh fair or fire and all the all the stuff that they’ve documented about what’s going on Like all of this seems to be in some way related to postmodernism Like I I can i’ll give you my theory on on how that’s connected but um, but I wanted to kind of Uh, just lay lay that out and say this is when I when I say, you know When when I attack postmodernism, this is the the experience that i’ve had that that leads me to that And that’s why like peterson’s message was so compelling because he seems to offer a very um His picture of reality seems to map really well to what i’ve seen and experienced Did you want to go further or should no I’d love to hear your response So, um There’s a lot to say there, um, I guess my my my response is I think I said this I said this I think to Is it to jordan? I think uh derrida and pico are often um Often invoked and very very rarely read um Because the commitment to rigorous thought and uh Criticism The criticism of the enterprise they’re engaged in a philosophy itself. There are philosophers who are willing to engage in deep criticisms of philosophy Um, I don’t see that in a lot of the phenomena you’re pointing to so the the chief objection I uh, I hear and I’m Um, I I know you’re saying many things so i’m just focusing on one but it’s a very prominent one is I want to I want to use a term actually from this this very great book It calls it missology, which is the hatred of logos And you know and derrida has logo centrism which people have picked up as a term and they and they wrote about which is the Which is the denigration of? Reason and and you mentioned this and so um, I don’t think we’re that far apart The the denigration of reason which is not the same thing as but it also has attended with it The denigration of science is found now on both the left and the right when I when I was growing up It was very easy for me to call myself the leftist precisely because the leftist claimed to uh care about Uh argumentation and science, um, that’s now increasingly not the case um, and And that’s why I’ve become increasingly Uh disillusioned and dissatisfied with um the left but that hasn’t meant that the right has picked up the gauntlet And now is you know, the staunch defender of reason and science. That’s not the case either, um and so I think The things that are driving your critique are actually things of which post the postmodern phenomena as as opposed to postmodernism Let’s say the postmodern phenomena is actually just symptomatic um which is uh Romanticism and nominalism Which are actually the more fundamental. So we we I mean Schindler does this he says, you know You basically have luther and you and then you have lusso and then I would add you have done scottis and occam And that’s at the foundation and that’s within uh within modernism um Again that that style of thinking that became predominant In pinker’s enlightenment model pinker is a representative of somebody who is defending modernism without I think appropriately understanding His commitment to nominalism and the implicit Right, uh the implicit ways it makes possible Romanticism and other things like that. So what is what is i’m saying? Just say john just i’d like you to break down Uh nominalism and and and uh romanticism briefly from the audience. Oh, sure Yeah, sorry. So nominalism was a uh philosophical movement that arose in the late middle ages with duns scottis Erosen theology by the way, all of these ideas tend to get the start there. Um Well, yeah, I mean postmodernism is we can come back to this is it’s an attempt to really extend Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology. So I want to put a pin in that and come back to that Because I think some of the greatest theologians today like mark taylor And john caputo are deeply in are deeply a are deeply influenced by postmodernism Uh, so let’s go back to it. So what are these theologians doing scottis and occam? They’re arguing. Um, I’ll try not to be very tight. The basic argument is there aren’t real there aren’t real patterns William of occam william of occam where we get occam’s razor and it’s I find many of the people who advocate for the enlightenment Or model of rationality, and they they frequently invoke occam’s razor and parsimony not realizing Uh how much of playdoh’s beard gets shaved by occam’s razor? So here’s here’s an ancient model here’s the ancient model is so We ask this question. We think it’s the way to ask the question and gerson makes this in his book on ancient pathology How could how what how do I know? What’s the act that I perform in order to know and so we we turn into the mind and we do this subjective reflection thing typified by of course dacar Now get back to normalism in a sec But the ancient world says no, no, no, let’s take it for granted that there’s knowledge And then the world has to be intelligible what kind what does the world have to be like in order to be intelligible? That’s the primary epistemological question, but it’s simultaneously an ontological question. There’s no there’s no deep separation And so for a long time it’s about what are the real patterns in the world? What’s the real intelligibility out there the normalists come up with the idea and say no, no, no those patterns aren’t really there The patterns are only We only we draw all these connections Between things and all those connections are just in our mind. They’re not out there in the world And then they’re in this weird position, by the way, because then they have to say there’s no real patterns in the world The only real patterns are in the mind that already builds in dacar’s dualism is all ready to go because they’re the world The world is now funded there’s right and the real patterns are only in here. There’s no real patterns out there, right? And then what you get is well, where does intelligibility actually exist? Well only in the mind So the thing the only the only thing that’s intelligible to the mind is itself And then you get dacar and you get trapped into Subjectivity you get trapped into the idea that all that i’m doing is getting a coherence of propositions. That’s nominalism I see what it does it isolates you and try it inside your own subjectivity It says that all that matters is a certain internal coherence of your proposition the connection to the world the connection to other people has been severed so I kind of what i’m kind of saying is I think when you’re shooting at postmodernism if that’s what because that’s the right way If that’s the right metaphor or if that’s your target, I think you’re missing the target I think postmodernism It I mean you get nominalism and then that basically makes cartesianism and then you get okay Well, what is the mind that it’s a completely internal formal system like a computer Computer is completely internal. This is a defining feature of the formal system The formal system like like the game of chess, you know, you don’t have to refer to anything outside of it It’s just internal system of reference and signs that gives you relativism that cuts you off that says right? There’s nothing about the world And like I said, Gerrit on makes use of the model of language and cognition as chess as a formal system It’s all there. It’s all there Romanticism picks up on this romanticism picks up on and says wow uh, you know, well what really ultimately matters then is like I’m not really getting anything from the world you get, you know day carton and conk. I’m just trapped inside here So all that really matters is how I can project onto the world and express onto the world And so everything is being constructed by me the person who creates all the doctrines you’re talking about is a romantic von herder He is the person who actually creates all these documents manifesting Yes the secret so I just want to just offer something there because so I I think a key point that I didn’t hear you make is nominalism refers to name right, so Is that that the the pattern? Exists because it is named it’s a version of the doubted chain, right? Yeah, it’s the pattern of the naming So it’s our use think about how this was so central to derrida It’s our use of language that actually creates so the you know, these two objects There’s no real relation between them It’s because it’s only because I give them the same name that in my mind that they come to belong together in some fashion They don’t belong together in the world in any fashion now. That’s obviously true for some things some things are Totally made to exist perhaps books because they’re artifacts or money because we name them But nominalism goes stronger than that and that’s why when people invoke ockham’s razor. They don’t understand what they’re doing It also says there’s no real patterns out there in the world like among pieces of gold Yeah, or molecules of sucrose. Yeah. Yeah, I want to I just want to really find my zone because I I always I keep coming back to like there’s not a better description of reality than the first three stanzas of the doubted chain Right, but you’re doing ancient epistemology Yeah, so so because because what’s happening is the dow is the dow that can be named is not the eternal that well I mean, that’s the opposite of nominalism the nameless is the mother of all things Yes What what exists is always beyond what we can name and then the name gives rise to the 10 000 things So what I hear is nominalism inverts this Yes The only way is the way that can be named The named is the mother of everything that’s essentially what you’re saying nominalism says that’s what nominalism is claiming. Yes very much So then romanticism then is a projection of essentially if that’s true Then our role as the as the agent is to project ourselves into the world Such as to create to manifest our reality Yes, you your task is to imagine so that you can express The world uh into existence the world so it’s the opposite. Uh, right and this is again what what peter doesn’t see Right is that the opposite That empiricism’s blank slate of the mind and romanticism’s blank canvas of the world are just mirror opposites of the same underlying Conceptual grammar. It’s the same way of thinking if you’re bound into the same nominalist epistemology That is going to undermine and notice nominalism undermines For when as soon as you think that as soon as you are buy into nominalism You are committed that reason is merely instrumental reason is not about Coming into contact with reality reason is merely instrumental and ultimately you’ll get nichi’s point that you know Dialectic is only it’s ultimately just a form of it Has come from rhetoric. It’s all just about this I think that’s the most important thing I think that’s the most important thing I think that’s the most important thing Okay, so For some reason what I want to bring up I think I can wrap this in but so I was listening to James Lindsay talk about you know The the history of leftist thought and there’s some really interesting things in this and there’s also some really for me As this idea of the dialectic theses antithesis synthesis, right within that you you also have your description It’s a metaphysics, right? It’s about grasping the absolute. It’s also a misrepresentation of platonic dialect Yeah, it is a modernist Cartesian misrepresentation of platonic dialect Okay, so then he makes the claim that so from hagel you get the young hegelians marx is a young hegelian marx tries to materialize To make in to to to take hagel and make it a materialist Essentially it remains a It remains a religious sort of system in a way, right? And there’s this idea of a transcendence to the next state, right? We have to destroy the world as it is It’s almost like gnosis, right? It’s very gnostic. It is it’s it’s very gnostic Uh and the and revolution becomes the primary religious act for bringing about the utopia. Yes. Yeah, so then so hagel marx And then the frankfurt school Right. So you have a durno and horcimer and uh And he he places a lot of importance on antonio Antonin gramski Grand he basically lays out five pillars of culture that have to be taken over Such that we can destroy the culture as it is In order to allow The utopia and and there’s something very russoian to me about all of this because They’re not at all prescriptive of how you actually get to the utopia. They really don’t have a strong They don’t have a strong. So okay, so you have gramski and he says okay gramski describes exactly what people are doing Look at what’s happening in the academia look at what’s happening in schools like schools and also the family And gramski says you have to destroy the nuclear family And of course now we see all this rhetoric around, you know You know destroy the nuclear family coming out of the left right now so then Then from gramski he trades his trees at mark q herbert marcusa marcusa He You have this essay repressive tolerance, which is basically this idea that you have to create a one y dialectic We’re only leftist where leftist ideas are always tolerated no matter How violent they are because they move us in the direction of liberation conservative ideas have to be have to be Censored even at the degree of thought Right and this is essentially what it lays out So you have marcusa and then marcusa becomes the mentor of angela davis And angela davis and bell hooks create critical race theory of the leftist And angela davis and bell hooks create critical race theory or um There’s one person i’m missing in that line, but okay so then you get and then Kimberly crinshaw and then you get intersectionality with kymberly crinshaw and that’s sort of the the the the operating system that all of the activism is is is based off and I find I think this is it makes a very compelling narrative. Sure And I think there’s truth in it and I think it’s valuable but here’s the problem I think you can find people saying something You can find people saying kind of whatever you want to say But is that actually where the ideas came from? Like I think the line from marcusa to angela davis is very clear But why is gramsky really the father of all this is everyone going back to gramsky? and like even even the the role of derrida and fukou as you’re saying like A lot of this may be actually a complete misunderstanding of them Like I read a really interesting essay on new discourses last night about how Derrida is actually really a quite um He’s not at all the sort of incomprehensible gobbledygook thinker that americans and experiences and experience him as when you read him in french it’s just that The way that he’s playing with language the way that he’s digging into language is very very dependent on the specific meanings of french words and it doesn’t translate and so yeah, he tries to do something very much like what the taotei chen does He tries to sit on that place between poetry and philosophy and so it gets It gets picked up by like judith butler and I mean, uh, uh, I think the guy’s name was christopher laured who wrote this But he basically points the finger at at women’s studies as the place in which activism sort of infests academia And then you have this the self-referential almost cult-like system that gets propagated and then women’s studies gives rise to gender studies gives rise to uh, race, uh ethnic studies and and you know, um whiteness studies and blackness studies and all of these studies things they all come Essentially originally from women’s studies So I I think um, so anyways So I so I don’t think that ideas I think his model is too emanationist. That’s what I want to say right It’s almost nominalist in a way. It’s like these This bad person produced these ideas and they’ve colonized the world And I don’t think it works that way. I think there has to be emergent bottom-up things that make That make the world um Ready for the seed of specific ideas Yeah, you should always I mean this is one of the things I know i’m glad you noticed that self-criticism, right? You’re making it there now, right? Which is um well What you’re assuming is the very thing you’re you’re I mean you’re begging the question because you’re assuming they’re very phenomenal You’re assuming that none of this was motivated by reason or argument or response to circumstance and then look It’s all just this and it’s like well if you assume that there’s no argument there Then this looks like you know, a malignant cancer spreading But if you assume no no, maybe there’s a lot in the culture that’s preparing this a lot that people don’t want to question um, uh, you know, uh that people are criticizing post-modernism like well What if there are really deep legitimate criticisms of modernism? What if there are? And what if this culture also has a mix a weird weird mix of nominalist? Monit uh modernism and then it’s decadent romanticism running through it and what if those are making These particular ideas particularly attractive right now Well, then you need to stand back and criticize like what if What if the commitment to an individualist model of meaning-making is something that post-modernism is actually undermining? And maybe that should be undermined Maybe there’s a problem with individualism Um, and you know I’m glad you said that because that resonates with a lot of what I want to say is because like I said I’ve seen other areas I gave you two at the beginning where these ideas have been taken up and they they’ve liberated Using that language intentionally they they’ve liberated thinking to recover something that had been lost Under the blinding glare of modernism, which is I think a more appropriate reading a less Anachronistic reading of Plato and platonic dialectic Allowing us to see how different it is from Hagellian dialectic, by the way, right? um, and like I said this new emerging model of Cognition as non-computational as deeply embodied You and I both advocate for embodiment embodiment, but it was it was feminist like Genevieve Lloyd in the book The man of reason who started you know was a significant contributor to this and saying like wait wait We are forgetting the book We like we did this weird the mind is masculine the body is feminine and we do all this weird Stuff and then right and then we’ve left embodiment out And you know and then heidegger was coming in and saying You know, well, maybe cognition isn’t computation and all of this stuff is germinating into The idea that you and I are both finding tremendously fruitful right now Which is the deep truth of embodiment try and find anybody in the enlightenment period talking about embodiment. Good luck Good luck. Try and find anybody doing that in in a way that it’s going to really Pardon me. What about hume? Hume doesn’t talk about it. That’s exactly the point toad’s critique of hume in body and mind Is hume does exactly the opposite hume takes an epistemology of an absolutely static spectator Interesting and that’s how that’s why he can’t see causality in the world because if you sit passively spectating You can’t get causality from into from the world and you will not see causality in oncology That’s the one of the core of toad’s critique of hume interesting toad Yeah, the body and what’s it called the body in the mind? I think t-o-d-e-s. Yeah, okay So I mean, yeah So one of the problems with postmodernism and thinking about it is the problem with what is modernism, right? it’s such a big it’s such a big thing to try to understand right and when like you know, um pinker came out with enlightenment now and you know, one of my good friends was a huge fan of that book and I I just like I think the blank slate is one of the most important books that I’ve read you know, I think how the mind works and you know, the language instincts is amazing, but Enlightenment now just doesn’t work for me For a variety of reasons and even the better angels of our nature i’m very skeptical of in parts but the thing with enlightenment now is it seems like he He extracts a very specific message from it that doesn’t represent kind of Is not very representational where it was and then he he also mixes up the ideas from counter-enlightenment thinkers with ideas from Enlightenment thinkers. It’s it’s not the work, but I would say I mean, I like the language instinct But the mind how the mind works, I strongly recommend reading jerry foders book the mind doesn’t work that way Okay, because he just well, I don’t know that book that well, so so I i’ll just for some That’s the cognitive science, right? That’s the cognitive science And so that’s where I can speak to with some expertise and foders critique of that book And and of its computationalism, which I think is the key model of of modernity Thomas hobs cognition is computation, right? I think foders critique of that and here’s what people need to understand fodder is a proponent And a producer of the computational theory of mind the fact that he is so willing to devastatingly Critique it shows you how how like this is not some Romantic this is somebody Foundational figure saying no. No, it ultimately isn’t working. It ultimately isn’t working. So This is interesting. I mean I’ve arrived There’s funny things happening in this conversation because I before that, you know, we were chatting before I was in a conversation with a ecological psychologist, right? Yeah, we were talking about some of these ideas right and about essentially the problem talking about the problem of Of the object subject divide. Yes introducing them to your idea of the transjective because essentially within ecological psychology they’re always talking about a coupling of environment to Exactly and then these are emergent and they’re non they’re non-mechanistic Right. And then all of this is really At the heart of the problem with modernity now I arrived at this in a very different way through my my work as a teacher as a movement teacher, right? Yes I i’m trying to remember where I did this talk, but I did a talk basically on The body’s not a machine and the mind is not a computer Yeah, and this was really influenced by your work because I what I was the argument that I was making is that um, Is that human beings kind of of necessity have to Orient their worldview or structure their cognition using analogy and that in the analogies that are available to us actually can provide us with great explanatory power, but also can trap us into Real sort of cul-de-sacs and being able to understand what things are like so if you look at the early to me if you look at the cart in the early modern period, it’s like the In trying to understand the nature of reality They end up falling into the analogy of clockwork because it’s this incredibly powerful technology. That’s very easy for us to understand right And so then as we develop computation Right and we develop machines Well, we start to analogize the body as the machine and the mind as the computer and that’s schema theory in motor learning Right that you have you have these motor programs that you play out. Nicolai bernstein blows that up in the 1920s It just doesn’t work. You can’t account for motor control that way and that’s where dynamical systems enters Yep, motor control and then you have uh and then you have the same thing with with ecological psychology and understanding the mind and in the body again is it doesn’t it like There’s this classic thing where You take a pig stewart mcgill takes a pig spine And he does as many he does a certain amount of flexion cycles on it and then it breaks And it says okay. Well, you only have so many flexion cycles In your in your life, right? So so then there’s this entire generation and And again, this isn’t really stewart’s fault, right? Stewart’s a much more sophisticated thinker than the people interpret him maybe in the same way that darida. Yeah, and Maybe fuco is than the people interpreted him But there was a a huge swath of physical therapists who took this to mean that essentially the spine should never move out of neutral position But athletic training, right kelly streit who I am a huge fan of who I love and I think his his ideas have become much more sophisticated In his books the supple leopard Has the first one of these first rules for being a supple leopard is what he calls the one joint rule Treat the spine as one joint which is insane Because why does it have all those other joints? Right, like why would nature do that? Right, so you but but this is you’re you’re expecting that the spine operates as a machine It’s it’s just it’s just matter, right? But you’re not understanding that it’s that it it it evolves it changes it It’s dynamic, right? Right. And so you you have the capacity to flex and flex over and over again Forever as long as you don’t exceed the capacity of your body to recover from reflection cycles, right because the tissue gets stronger And so but what was really interesting about this is So many of these people who came out of this physical therapy tradition of the neutral spine developed incredibly fragile spines Yeah, and i’ve worked with all these physical therapists who Who hurt themselves as soon as their spine moves out of neutral and you have to move out of neutral position Absolutely cannot function as a human being without regularly moving your spine out of neutral But if you try all the time what you do is you You make the buffers of what your body can do smaller. Okay, so maybe i’m going too far with this this analogy but the point that I was making in that is that the analogy of the Of the body as a machine has not served us and trying to take it apart and make the pieces of it Better that’s bodybuilding All right, or aerobic training and it doesn’t function right? You can look at the systems the mobility system the hypertrophy system the cardiovascular system You can break down, you know back and by chest and try and it’s like this is failing us as a model for Actually motivating people to move and it’s failing us as actually developing athletes who are anti-fragile and Get development a strong will right? Okay. Good. I want to show you how strong well Okay, good I want to show you what something here because I want to show you what so you said we had this model You know the the body’s a machine the mind’s a computer and it’s failing And then you try to make you trying to make you trying to make it intelligible Why is it failing and then you engaged in in derrida’s deconstruction and pucco’s archaeology what you said is there was a metaphor? Which are normally made peripheral right or derrida’s term They’re marginalized and what we do is we pay attention to the argument and we forget the metaphor that’s at the margin But it’s the metaphor that’s really doing a lot of the work and what you do is we’ll foreground the metaphor and do what you did Let’s question it. Let’s not assume that it should be an unquestioned thing and then you bring in pico and say, you know What we have to remember that these metaphors can’t like they they they have a power to them. They’re not just Ideas that are true They empower us in certain ways and part of the reason why they’re adopted isn’t just their truth But as you said their power the power they give us over nature the power they give us over other people So what you did is you said wait, this is failing that the the the model for modernity is failing It’s failing in people’s lives Why is it failing? Ah, it’s failing because it had an implicit metaphor that we should now Foreground and question that’s gerda and we should then note You know, well in addition to it being you know, untrue. Why was it? Why was it so pervasive? Well, it was bound up with the way it empowered us the clockwork model empowered us to work And we have to we have to step back and be willing To give up that power commitment when we give up the metaphor if we say i’m going to give up the metaphor But i’m going to keep the power commitment and this is fukos point that’s duplicitous That’s disingenuous if you want to give up the metaphor You don’t just give it up in thought you have to give it up in right your commitments to it’s the way it empowers you In the world, that’s the fukoian Critique and you were just doing it there Right, and i’m sorry. I’m not trying to i’m not trying to do jiu-jitsu move you i’m trying to show you right? How you know the the moves that we’re making have they become almost natural to us um, and that’s perhaps a little bit wringing itself, but those have been afforded by You know, the basically You know nichi and heidegger onward had given us the tools to make these kinds of critiques so that we can liberate ourselves Boy, i’m not i don’t usually use this language. We can liberate ourselves from the self-destructive self-destructive aspects of modernism Particularly that model Notice there’s there was other things in there that were still implicit. It’s the model of an individual Body that’s a machine an individual mind that it’s a computer, right? And it’s non-developmental because the hardware doesn’t matter only the software matters and the hardware is replaceable with technology here Right that will like there’s there’s there’s even more things to unpack In modernity’s model of the human being and its relationship to the world and notice if you think of the mind as a computer What do you think of reason reason is completely instrumental? Its whole job is just to run whatever software it can to get the kind of output that it best needs to manipulate the world And and what do we do? We surround ourselves with reinforcements of both that power over the world and that modeling of ourselves in all of these computers that are doing All of these things right now. That’s the kind of thing that that is being talked about It doesn’t mean notice I can I can point out that and value that without saying Oh, well, that means that every power system is corrupt, right? And that’s what i’m trying to get at. I’m trying to get at like are we really the way I try to see it is like I try to I hope this won’t be Sounds ridiculously canadian, but I think the most important Attitude towards post-modernism, especially people like darodon puto is a very studied and deep ambivalence precisely because For me what they’re what they are still This is like heidegger’s critique of nichi. He said nichi was trying to escape from christianity and all he did was invert it Post-modernism is showing us all the problems Within it’s giving us the tools to critique modernism, but it’s still trapped within the same framework Of modernism. It’s still for example trapped in the frameworks of nominalism still it’s still trapped within a contient epistemology It’s still trapped within a certain model of science that really doesn’t line up with how science actually operates It’s still bound to propositional tyranny Not darodon. There’s nothing outside the text writing precedes language all of that stuff, right? And so For me, I see it I see I see it as right. I see it as convergent with other critiques But what what it’s it’s still bound to the thing that that’s why and other people christopher norris and other some some of the best commentators on Post-modernism especially deconstruction said, you know, it can’t it isn’t a philosophy and it’s of itself. It’s it’s completely parasitic It’s completely dependent on on the productions of the modernist framework in order to have something to talk about Now I think that That’s the unfortunate feature That tends to bleed into activism and it’s increasingly self-radicalization Because it is ultimately a parasitic movement. It is a it is a parasitic movement that only works by continually right trying to criticize deeper and deeper modernity without offering alternatives, but that’s why i’d like The four e cognitive science people and things like that because they or can make Convergent critiques, but they’re also proposing something other Than the cartesian contian framework Sorry, that was a bit of a speech, but I want to okay So there’s a couple things that I wanted to do that one is I want to note that um And and maybe you can break this down for me but we can come back to it But essentially you you mapped the argument I made to arguments that fukon darodame And I accepted those arguments reflect each other now whether Whether my capacity to make that argument is dependent on their having uh Uh have made created those those argumentations or heidegger and niche. That’s um, that’s something that I don’t feel has been demonstrated right, so So well then the thing to say is where have you gotten your critique of that from and you’ve got it from me You said and I have been influenced by those ideas, so that’s a pretty direct line. Yeah. So, um So anyways, I I think I still think that I have some agnosticism about that But but I don’t want to get too trapped up in that one thing I but what I think is interesting here is the idea of one thing I find really interesting here is the idea of of of uh of postmodernism as being uh Parasitic and also unstable because it doesn’t actually propose a replacement, right? It critiques without transcending in some sense. Yeah, and so this is so Peugeot has done some really interesting videos about the idea that that postmodernism views itself directly as parasitic Like it uses that description of itself, right? And you know, this is I a lot of people in my circles have pointed me to ken wilbur And you know, we’ve talked about interval a little bit I started digging into it and i’m a little bit more skeptical of some of his models than than I was before I dug Into it, but he has this this and this description and you know I think it’s I think there’s some truth in it some merit in it at least which is that You can’t have a grand narrative that there is no grand narrative. It just collapses and inverts, right? And so that’s what I mean about it very much like Yeah, and again pageau does I think brilliant work in showing how So much of what’s happening is just inversion, right? Yes. He’s we’re just we’re just We um, we reject the hierarchy of male over female, right? But then we just capitulate the pattern but put women at the top of it Right. So he talked about this in a really beautiful video where he broke down like That image happening over and over again. You see logan replaced by the young woman you see In mad max fury road max furiosa replaces the the the the sort of male hero Yes, you see it over and over again, but they don’t They don’t actually the the female heroes don’t actually represent a new form of virtue Or a a an integration of the masculine and the feminine in a more sophisticated and mature way No, they just represent a kind of resentment of the negative aspect of the masculine And Yeah, there’s this there’s the sort of idea the idea seems to be the masculine messed up and is bad So it needs to be replaced with the feminine, but there’s no actually articulation of what that is Or how that works or how it integrates better and they work better together He points this out as well as in moana, right? Which I love moana and I think that it has some really beautiful beautiful elements in it But I also think his critique of it is quite interesting, right that That the masculine culture figure Is maui and essentially he’s completely incompetent and everything is given to him at the end um Yeah, and there’s other inversions that you know, if you can see it people have noted this in the sitcoms from the 70s onward the adults the adults going from being sort of uh, I don’t know like figures into being being becoming buffoons and then buffoons that And then their primary function is just to love and adore their children. They don’t have any sort of significant role around that Independent of that. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of that going on And and that’s really That’s really yeah I just want to say that I mean the the fact that it’s parasitic and the inversion Uh is actually problematic from even I don’t want to be in always in the position of by the way defending post-modernism but I mean the you know, the the best post-modernists are trying to uh overcome the dichotomies at least that’s You can and you can see this You can see this in the end towards the end of the close career the technology of the self And then derrida starts to get into a discussion with uh negative theology Uh, because they’re trying to well, what would it be like to instead of just critique? What would it be like to transcend and of course they have problems with that because they don’t they they they they don’t have an ontology That affords transcendence so they just invoke it Which is really problematic for derrida by the way, because he’s deeply deeply indebted to levinas and the concept of Transcendence is crucial for levinas’s word. Yeah more about who levin house is so levinas is um a philosopher um He’s jewish I only mention that because it actually matters uh to his thinking um, and levinas is famous for Pointing out how ethics precedes ontology. This is his way of trying to break out of Uh, the the the the modernity’s claim that epistemology so the ancient world is ontology Precedes epistemology And now with modernity, it’s no no with dacar think of it, you know epistemology you do epistemology Once you fit you can’t until you finish the epistemology Don’t do any ontology and then after that perhaps some ethics or you throw the ethics out off the site somehow they can’t right Levinas was saying no. No. No. What happens is we actually confront other people he calls it the face or the other And they directly challenge our egocentrism on our subjectivity they put a demand on us to transcend ourselves and that is that that that initial confrontation with the other It right is the source of ethics because ethics requires at its fundament a transcendence of self-interest and self-centredness and so he says right, uh if What happens first is our ethics and and then the point along the way is if you don’t have any sort of ethical Normativity, you’re actually not going to get any epistemology. You’re not going to get any ontology You know, and that’s why if you if you if you read darida and you see it you see this in the movement Right, you see that underneath all of this stuff. There’s this there’s this ethical imperative that is very very um Powerful, but also very very implicit So Okay, there’s a lot to unpack there the thing that’s coming up for me is so i’ve been I’ve been reading I was reading uh, post-modernist stuff and I was reading ecological psychology Um, yeah, and I I love ecological psychology But there’s also a part of it that starts to feel several self-referential and almost like another closed almost theological system to me Yeah, and one of the things about is it’s always about this this what is that the mind inside of and this this idea of this reciprocal coupling relationship and They wave at the fact that motivational states are necessary, but it doesn’t seem to be to be really Hammered in on yeah, like for me and you know If you’re an ecological psychologist and you’re listening to this and I completely get this wrong forgive me I don’t know the literature that well, but this is my sense And tell me if i’m wrong here I would nest ecological psychology with an evolutionary theory and sometimes it doesn’t feel like that’s fully happening And the evolutionary theory tells us that the organism arises with motivations, right? It’s trying to At least we have appetite and aversion And those are necessary for any type of coupling to the environment You have to have you have to have a normative what you just said a normative framework But the most fundamental normative framework is consume things that that nourish you avoid things that destroy you That’s that that’s that’s how life starts Yes, so then you you start with these and we iterate out other motivational states on top of that but the The organism can’t be coupled to the environment without a motivational state I agree. There’s no motivational state and so so you’re just what I heard and what you’re just saying is that Before we have epistemology before we have ontology we have motivation and understanding motivation is Is kind of that’s We have to we have to get that first in a way. Well, here’s what I bring in And I think that’s right. I think it’s out of poesis Yeah, right and then I I want to if we can bridge into How the relevance realization is that? There it is difference I think is very similar to verveky’s relevance realization so but one of the things that uh, one of the things that goes goes with this is that Autopoesis and affordance are like are inter-defining things. There’s no affordances without autopoetic entities But there’s also no autopoetic entities that are affordances exactly. Yeah, right. So so again, I I think if we say motivation We have to understand it as that as that dyad not just as an internal an internal feeling state that moves the The mind computer and the body machine is saying no, no, no The world has a certain intelligibility. There’s this stuff happening in and then motivation is the emergence of an affordance between them Um, so that action is now possible It lies together, right? And i’m wanting to there’s a passage from the daddy ching that wants to come forward in my brain But I can’t quite articulate it but it’s like Being a non-being arise together these things arise together. You have to have You you can’t have Affordances you can’t have an autopoetic Thing without an affordance, but the affordance doesn’t Exist it’s not it’s not real until there’s an autopoetic thing to interact. That’s right. That’s right. Exactly So there there is a mutual mutual causality or or reciprocal causality there so And that’s also something that Right. You don’t you don’t hear postmodernism reflecting on the fact that it’s still committed to a newtonian physics The newtonian model of causality you talk a newtonian model of how human beings interact with the world Right. And so there’s a way in which Um, it’s I think you’re right Um the the fact that it’s sort of bound to the critique of modernism has rendered it incapable I have to be careful about this because I think like I said at the end Foucault’s reading hado and starting to really deeply reflect on hado and you know how deeply hado has influenced me and like I said and darida is entering into conversations with buddhist and and Neoplateness foucault is reading the stoics and he’s also reading the christian monks Because he’s trying to understand wisdom again like there’s there right and so I see the great thinkers towards the end turning away From critique and trying to open up to well trying to come up with a positive response so sorry, there’s something that just keeps coming up for me that I need to address which is like so As I was preparing for this interview and reading up like I started to feel a lot more open to darida, right? I listened to a very short essay on darida from like philosophy from like philosophy dot net on youtube, right and essentially they say that basically what darida does is he just Their description of darida is that darida elevates doubt and makes us start to question things And I actually think this is really necessary And like, you know, you and I have talked about r scott baker and how much his work sort of keeps resonating for me I keep getting deeper my philosophy gets the more i’m like, oh, oh, yeah baker baker’s Imagery and symbolism and the way he wraps it in just keeps hitting for me but the the main character of uh Of the the arc of the second apocalypse is this character drusas akamia and essentially he’s a voice for doubt That’s really what it is and and that’s really powerful to me, right like like I I described to Recently, i’ve i’ve been playing with this idea that like my fundamental axioms are respect mystery Serve love seek truth and cultivate virtue Right. So it’s like the outermost thing is that I that I will never know That will always be insufficient in the face of of the of the mystery, right? The next thing is that the way that I orient towards that is love And in order to serve love well I have to put myself in a relationship to truth in order to be willing to face truth I need courage and capacity and I need all those heroic virtues that I talk about. Yeah And I think the kind of doubt you’re talking about is not humane doubt It’s not it’s not the epistemological hand-wringing that has set us for so long. It’s socratic oporio It’s the kind of thing that sets you into wonder Right who brings back to word of porio, right? Yes, and then that’s not a coincidence, right? It’s the idea of well What you’re trying to do is realize Right that you’re trying to realize You’re trying to realize that You have We have fallen into taking for granted the medium of our intelligibility Without real without remembering the cost of those medium you pointed that earlier We said we had this metaphor We have this way we have this model and then it has this cost and we we keep marginalizing and not paying attention to the cost We get low. No, no, no, no And it’s like the a porius to get it’s like it’s like what the cynics would do like diogenes, right? The point of the a porius to get your stuff back and go realize. Oh wait It maybe it doesn’t have to be this way And what are the costs of committing to it this way? Um so okay, so I really like that. I’d like to go further with that But this thing I have to get it out which is fukkō to me though is still deeply deeply disturbing and I find him Like I think that I think there is something sinister something evil within postmodernism and I really attribute a lot of it to fukkō Oh, okay, because I believe that fukkō like Um Nietzsche writes that you know, uh In every you know that every philosophy is really the confession of the philosopher, right? Yeah Yeah, which is I find that I always find that humorous about Nietzsche because he’s all he’s he’s ever Yeah, sure but But as I understand it fukkō reads an essay where basically, um Nietzsche says that we need to That we that the idea of looking at history objectively is kind of absurd and that the whole point of history isn’t to under Isn’t isn’t to understand the past it’s to be able to act in the present So he then turns around and basically writes this series of histories that are philosophical Where he happily falsifies things in order to get across his point, right? His whole analogy of the ship of fools in in madison civilization is just completely false He just makes it up. He takes an image from heronymous bosh and and writes it into history And you know his second great book is eros and civilization. I think and and essentially, you know his big argument is Is that all of the rules around sexuality are are socially constructed and he’s a sadomasochistic homosexual pedophile And his desire is to is to is to be able to do these things little boys he goes on and writes a letter with john de paul sartre and and darada and simone de bea Asking to get completely rid of all age of consent laws in In this and he writes about the capacity of children to to have sexual feelings and and all this stuff as somebody who’s a victim of sexual abuse as a child like Like this just is evil to me like fukkō is a figure of evil And I mean noam chomsky said that when he spoke with with With fukkō that he felt like he was the most profoundly Amoral person he’d ever encountered so like for me There’s something there is something I still see in in post-modernism like we’re we’re making the case for some of the value of it And I and I buy it but I also think there’s something deeply that it’s deeply about resentment and about essentially being able to To strip down the structure of society such that you can play out your own perversions I’m not going to deny that that that’s going on. I would use fukkō to make that critique Of fukkō, which is to realize that whenever people are making knowledge claims They’re also trying to create a particular way to wield power, which is exactly your argument There’s a there’s a there’s an important post-modern irony in what you just did which is Uh fukkō falls prey to a fukkōian type of analysis But you can do that, but it goes back. I mean and you know You know Nichi’s argument that Christianity is just resentment can be understood as just the resentment of christianity Right, you can just like oh you were the son of a lutheran pastor Gee, I wonder why you dislike christianity so much nichi, right? I mean and so like and so the concern I and you know My concern is I want to both Respond as your friend and then love to the fact That you were abused and just first acknowledge that And so I think you should endeavor to push back as virtuously but also as strenuously as you can against anybody that you in good conscience think is trying to Make that more possible. I think you have every Not right, I think you have every obligation to do that and so I wanted yes, I think you should and so i’m not trying to defend Fukkō from that. That’s what I tried to do with that jiu-jitsu move that I just did and say But look what like what is it we’re doing? um And and and the thing that I would ask After you acknowledging what I just said to you like as as a person I mean Schneider is one of the things he says that he’s worried about He says that you know postmodernism is only the latest symptom of something that’s going back basically To nominalism on but you can see it accelerating is what he calls intellectual impatience um Where we’re increasingly not caring about what is said and increasingly caring about who says it And we’re increasingly not caring about what they say, but either how can it be applied or what negative? Possible net negative ethical repercussions could it have down the road? now And you know and again the reason why these take root is because There’s some deep truths in them, right? We should like we that I think the character of the person should matter Uh, but we can now turn it in that if that’s taken too far it becomes like cancel culture And by the way, the left and the right are equally guilty of this. So claiming this is a left issue That’s come on the right is doing it too, right it is doing it too. I don’t know that they’re equally guilty I think that might be a false equivalence, but they’re certainly very guilty Okay, okay. Well, I don’t know. Okay, so i’ll withdraw equally because I haven’t done enough empirical work. Um, but I would say If you go back to the 90s Cancel culture was much more a thing of the right And I would say the most recent sort of Drive towards council culture has largely been driven on the left and the left has a lot more power to cancel at this stage But there’s large elements of the right that are trying to reclaim that power and apply it, right? They don’t they don’t they don’t have twitter and instagram and facebook and google to apply Leverage on their cancellation, but there’s every evidence that if they did they would be acting just as negatively or more negatively than the people But when they held the cards when they held the churches and they were the most powerful way of disseminating something They were happy to wield it them. Oh, yeah Right, right. Okay. So we we agree with that. So the point what i’m trying to say is like this intellectual impatience um Is is is something that? uh Schneider saying we need to step back from we need to we need to pay attention to You know, not just the source and the consequences we need to play pay attention to the manner and the matter Like what is being? What is being proposed and also how is it being proposed? Yeah, because if not we we are we are we are Removing the capacity for reason to itself be compelling as reason We’re only saying something’s compelling because of who said it and because we agree with where it’s going to go Yeah to whom right and I mean like I want to acknowledge that and and say like Like there I felt compelled to say that right and to share that now There’s multiple ways that that could play out. One way is actually essentially the the woke culture move right now I have placed myself in a Category of marginalized group a victim of sexual abuse I have targeted a thinker as a exemplar of the people who have oppressed me Yeah, and I’m gonna say this is now a reason to reject their thinking which is by the way Is largely a religious style of argumentation by the way. Yeah, absolutely. I feel that at some point. So now I I don’t want to do that. That’s not what i’m trying to do. Sure. I I i’m trying to I mean, okay. I’m gonna i’m gonna state that I don’t think that’s what i’m trying to do Maybe there’s an underlying emotional reaction that is actually driving me in that direction Right, and I wanted to acknowledge that by the way, I didn’t want to acknowledge that I didn’t want to dismiss that I’m not trying to be dismissive of that. No, no, that’s fine so so i’m so i’m just i’m just sort of saying, you know, just like acknowledging my own potential bias that I think that um it I felt like it’s useful to to bookmark that as a potential source of bias for me But also as like a you know, like this has real consequences these arguments it does it does it doesn’t a person who like Foucault makes the argument for pederasty from the greek tradition. That’s the same argument the person who abused me made Yes, I know but see I don’t want people to stop reading Plato because of that either Okay No, and and i’m not saying that you should and I think this is an extra like I wanted to write an essay about this in Reference to the to movement culture to movement culture actually our flawed forefathers, right? Yes, like if you get rid of every We will also be flawed forefathers. That’s what we have to remember. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, do you rid of every Every man who’s abused his power to to take advantage sexually of of somebody In uh in the history of physical culture you would be left you would you couldn’t you couldn’t make a coherent culture You couldn’t make a coherent story of what had happened You got rid of everyone who had had done a bad business deal or taken advantage of an underling like a matt You you could do this in science, right? Yeah, every scientist who took some credit for something their graduate student did you can no longer cite or Or use in your argumentation like how many scientific cases would collapse do we stop? Believing in the uncertainty principle because heisenberg worked for the nazis. Yeah, exactly Right. So so I don’t i’m not trying to do that with with fukko, okay I’m what i’m trying to say is I think that there is within post-modernism something that is something in its dna that is actually about trying to achieve that end Right that the the destruction of all sort of sexual moors That’s still propagating itself through the left Is very very friendly to people who want to utilize it to victimize people And and so that doesn’t it doesn’t mean that everything that fukko said is Is dangerous or bad or that there wasn’t real insight in his work But I would say that someone approaching his work should approach it with that understanding and should not dismiss that Well, I think you’re now coming close to the position that i’ve been advocating for which is a deeply reflective ambivalence That’s because that is the position I keep advocating for here. I think deifying or demonizing I i’m sorry It’s funny. There’s an irony here. I say that and I said the same thing, you know about you know, jordan peterson I think deifying him and demonizing him is to is to make him fundamentally irrelevant And and and remove you and allow you to be intellectually lazy and intellectually impatient with him, right? And I think the same thing with post-modernism. I think right you should neither deify it Or demonize it. I think you should do what we’re doing here This is to me the appropriate response we disagree, but we disagree We disagree uh, you know Friendly in a way in which we can get into dialogos. We’re both drawing each other out. We’re both inducing from each other We’re both moving towards each other. We’re both moving around right, uh the phenomenon that’s under investigation, right that’s all i’m not that’s really all i’m arguing for um, and I I think that The the what one of the things I’m worried about is it I I agree I agree Let me just say this really the the deification of this stuff has turned into a religion. I mean, I think Uh, I mean, I think unless you’re just deeply entrenched in it, right? I think of america is now in fact in the middle of a religious civil war between the trump cult and the woke religion Uh, which are which I think religions I don’t know. I’m sure there’s something worse, but man, they’re really low on the on the On the category list of badly formed religions q anon versus woke is is Well, but but but but that’s but but I would say the fact that both sides Are in the basement of their ontologies and their capacity for uh, deep, uh, uh, sapiential transformation points to Uh schneider’s overall point that we have we have devolved to in increasingly short-term intellectual impatience So but so what what I wanted to say is that the the the deification in wokeism I think your critiques are well are well said and they should be paid careful attention to My concern is the demon The demonization Right leads to an unconscious and you can see this in people like rationality rules and sam sam harris You can get you can get stephen pinker you can get this and you’ve made this point this uncritical valorization Of modernism and a cartesian framework that I think is worthy of being pretty much devastatingly destroyed Because of the way it is it is I mean it is deeply misleading us both scientifically and existentially So i’m trying to get to a place where we can Step between those and that’s what I saw ridiculously canadian and i’m sorry I have come to I have I don’t know if i’ve told you this is this is a really random thing, but so I’m I grew up 50 miles from the canadian border And so canadians come down here traditionally came down here a lot to shop and also to ski on the mountains And there’s this like friendly, um disdain for canadians right right little brother Can’t his money doesn’t looks funny and doesn’t you know, it’s like you’re supposed to disdain canadians Right and the accents the hay People people in british columbia, they don’t believe me. No nobody in british columbia will admit this but they don’t say a Right. They say hey Yeah Welcome to canada. Hey So anyways so then so then uh then then I Found jordan peterson his accent absolutely drove me crazy originally and it becomes this huge influence for me now you and I are friends You become one of my biggest influential Now my favorite show is letter kenny I swear wayne is like he’s like jordan peterson’s less intelligent cousin, right like work yourself out. Okay Um You gotta you gotta watch the show it’ll crack you up, um, you’d be like, okay I get it. Um And so yeah, I have this this real canada file thing that’s happening now Everyone tells me I have to read marshall mcclough and i’m like, I don’t know I don’t know if I can handle like he handed up this much doesn’t make any sense Anyways, that’s that’s that’s me on the point, but it’s it’s just a funny thing I think these small rivalries are important, right? We have to have some in-group out-group, but uh Well, hopefully we have what you know what you know was in the greek city states There was enough shared culture but enough difference that there was this tremendous creativity Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you need a you need safe places to put your your your tribalism, right? That’s why Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I refuse to like soccer It’s like it’s the one way that I can be a a jingoistic american in a way that’s totally not harmful to anybody Right. So, okay. So Here’s a point that i’ve been wanting to get to though and to get us back on on on the track. So so I laid out james lindsey’s argument, right and um, and i’ve talked about peterson’s argument and um I I think I think it’s it’s too top down, right? And And so I think we have to have an analysis that asks what are the bottom-up characteristics that could rise to this so I uh, I wanted to read you a couple passages. Um, just just to give you a sense of how like i’m sure that you’re familiar with this but like so I suppose I would say that my criticism of you is that I think that your project of saying let’s recover the value of postmodernism is smart Like I think that’s great like let’s integrate and let’s also be really Really articulate in what the in where the problem is right? Yeah, okay The problem isn’t necessarily what derrida derrida is saying or understand derrida. Well, right but I don’t I don’t hear you often acknowledge so you have in this conversation Just how much pernicious stuff flies under the postmodernism banner. So I think it’s valuable to be more more More What’s the word explicit about About the problem of postmodernism as a sort of phenomenon within the academy while also being able to say What’s its source? And is it really about those original thinkers and is there something valuable we can recover from those original thinkers? I agree with that I think that’s fair I would I would point out that uh, this this attempt to um Appreciate postmodernism while also criticizing and move beyond it is one of the defining features of metamodernism Yes. Yeah. Yeah, metamodernism. Yeah. I mean, this is what integral people are pointing at and yeah, so Here’s a here’s a few quotes though that I think people like if people aren’t familiar with this or haven’t gone through it like And one thing that bothers me is a lot of people seem to think that this stuff started in like two 2014 um, and it’s like no the like it starts in the 70s at least 60 70s, so Well starts before that romanticism nominalism. We’re going way back now the 1992 draft of the national science education centers For example claim to be based on a contemporary approach called postmodernism questions the objectivity of observation and the truth of scientific knowledge A recent book on science paul form an historian of science at the smithsonian speaks approvingly of our postmodern world with its social construction epistemology and morality based rather than truth based wealth gift fuel, which I think means basically worldview Many scientists educators now endorse a porous modest perspective on science which incorporates some of the more extreme feminist views For example students supposedly need to learn that the so-called laws of nature are social constructions whose deval validity depends on consensus The consensus is driven by interests not epistemic considerations Sciences politics by the means yes, there’s no legitimate universal science only local ethno sciences which have been oppressed or colonized The emphasis on so-called scientific objectivity only serves as a cover for exploitation Instead we need advocacy research and emancipatory science Um the very format, uh is what quite a Uh Whatever sophisticated caveats when they wish to put on the viability of the fact value distinction and whatever however difficult it may be To ever live up to the scientific ideal of the disinterestedness It is quite a radical step to call for the deliberate injection of politics in the very formation of scientific hypotheses As does halloween longino professor of philosophy and women’s studies at minnesota I am suggesting that feminist scientific practice admits political considerations as relevant constraints on reason If faced with a conflict between political commitments and a particular model of brain behavior, we allow the political commitments To guide the choice Yeah, and I see this over and over again. I’ve seen interviews with with scientists people are coming up in the field We do not see science as Instrumental towards truth. They see it as serving a political function like james lindsey has talked about Medical isinquism like and I think essentially we’re we’re seeing isinquism arise in In every different field as it’s colonized by critical theory. Yeah, I I agree that that’s happening I and I think that all of that was pernicious However, again Do the thing that they’ve worried about caveat? Uh, it isn’t pico who first says knowledge is power. It’s francis baby Okay, one of the founding figures Of the scientific worldview, right and so Like there’s a little bit of throwing stones in glass houses going on there. It’s like well, yes, that is pernicious but What is it? That you know, what it what what did bacon mean and how has that been? Knowledge is power can mean We should put nature on the rack and torture her to reveal her secrets. How’s that quote? Yeah. Yeah, that’s a pretty harsh one But there’s still a difference between Saying that all knowledge is just a construction of power And saying that knowledge empowers us. Those are two quite different things to me. Well, how does it empower us and in what way? Right. It empowers us because what it does is that the main point of science is not the epistemic Accumulation of truth the main point of science is to give us control over nature And he’s using religious imagery there putting nature on the rack Almost always it’s going to be a woman by the way, not a man, right? You know, and there’s there’s all kinds of stuff going on there now again Does that mean that we should stop reading einstein? No, i’m not saying that right, but what i’m saying is That’s what they’re saying what they’re saying is don’t read einstein because he’s a dead white male Right and that and that and that’s exactly the mistake the mistake And so the the point the point the point is but let’s let’s look again The point I want to make is what made that what made like your your question What was the bottom up? What was the fertile soil that made that seed take root? It isn’t just Right sort of postmodernist propaganda and I think what you read there is propaganda, right? It’s the fact that we had we had koon and lacquer toast and fire oven Right and all the anti-realism within science and all of these people are actually doing as far as I can tell really sincere Deeply rationally reflection deep rational reflection on the nature of science And I think those you know, and those debates haven’t been resolved the demarcation problem is still a real problem Right and the realism anti-realism debate is still a real issue in science. And so again like We we can’t then go back to saying oh well science just is This algorithmic access to truth this a historical machine that just gives us the truth That’s also I think deeply wrong and deeply misleading So is there a way in between those? Yeah so by the way for anyone who wants to get the source of those quotes is this book professing feminism by uh, Daphne court daphne pate and the noreta court key Um, I want to read you one more passage out of it because I think it speaks to what you’re saying I think it’s really powerful because so they’re they’re they’re talking about the anti-scientism of feminism and they highlight this passage as exemplary of it, but I actually think that this passage is is is is appropriate and true Okay um The sociologists of science harry collins and trevor pinch would not describe themselves as being anti-science their popular book the golem is constructed around a very ambivalent metaphor Science is a golem. It is powerful. It grows more powerful every day It will follow orders do your work protect you from the ever threatening enemy, but it’s clumsy and dangerous without control A golem may destroy its master with its flailing vigor Yeah, and this I actually think is right at the heart of what you’re doing. It’s the heart of peugeot It’s the heart of uh of what peterson’s doing all of it and essentially and this is also where I get tripped up with james lindsey because in in um In peugeot’s conversation with rationality rules. Yes, where do you stand? right, where do you stand and And he’s saying that you’re What I think he’s saying I should say is that you’re trying to You’re invoking a circular reasoning to to justify your normative stance from your scientific epistemology and it it’s it’s it’s it’s incoherent, right? um and And what what I think that indicates is that science can only operate effectively within a normative framework exactly right so what the problem is that critical theory and post-modernism as a sort of Not just thinking of fukko, but as a as a as a broader phenomenon within the social sciences and critical literature It it has assumed It has it has adopted A religious normative framework that that believes that it is the science it believes that it is a a a Because it comes out of academia that is validated in the same way that sciences are and it wants to colonize science And completely take it over like everything has to serve That that’s right. And that is really a theological Yeah, not an epistemological move or even an oncological move I get that I get that So the problem that I have with lindsey is He correctly diagnoses the problem But he actually doesn’t have a solution because he’s still trying to pretend that he’s standing in a place from nowhere Exactly exactly right and he’s not he’s talking about the left Which is which is great, but I think it’s like well, what is the liberal tradition? What is the conservative tradition? Like and how do all those things apply it’s like you can It’s distorting to me as a lens when you sort of say, okay We’re gonna just just look at this as as the problem All right. I don’t think that you should be out. I think that And I don’t do this But I think that if you’re looking at wokeism, you should be looking at qanon, right? And you should be looking back to how sololinsky’s rules for radicals was adopted by What’s his name not ken star There was a The leader of the republican party behind the scenes who got bush elected. I can’t remember his name, but he basically Yeah, you know the rules for radicals to drive the political narrative in america for a decade on the republican side So Now i’m getting all passionate about too many different things but to go back to it um What I one of the things that I wanted to do here is Get back to this analysis of what is the bottom up right? I think we’ve done a beautiful job of kind of articulating a lot of these things and I wanted to offer an idea and and then Do you have a time constraint you’re looking a little distracted No, i’m not distracted at all. I think I think I was looking inward to What’s my state of mind? I think that’s all that’s all I was doing Um, so uh After the after george floyd’s um murder or manslaughter, uh There was this huge protest and it happened all over the world and I felt like those protests were really out of Scope and the way that the problem was just being described was inaccurate, right? There are There are lots of racial problems in america, but the rate at which there’s you know 19 1-hour black men were killed by police that year and 40 white men were killed And you can look at george floyd and you can look at tony timpa and see this same thing But nobody knows who tony timpa is and yes black men are killed at a rate that is outside of their their percentage of population but if you understand the levels of Uh of encounters with the police and crime that are happening within those communities at all. It all makes sense, right? It’s There are more there are more Black men murdered in one weekend in chicago by other black men than there were by police, right? So It Is police brutality a problem? Yes, it is I mean, I think roland fisher is the best criminologist who’s looked at this and he’s found that that That uh black men are about 50 more likely to get low level, uh force from police officers In any given encounter, right? Right, right one encounter begins And that’s a real issue and I have lots of black friends who who report they’re really uncomfortable Experiences with the police so i’m not dismissing it but I’m saying when you look specifically at lethal violence, you don’t find that there’s a real There’s a real issue there and that That it was being propagated through the media narrative was that this is a huge problem There’s an open season on young black men, right? This was happening all the time And then you had these huge protests that were incredibly destructive to the very communities that were so they were supposed to serve right creating food deserts and you know companies are running away and you know, uh linden, uh, Leonidas johnson has documented all of the black children who’ve been killed as a result of street violence, right? And we’ve seen that murder rates in these communities are up 400 percent, right since the george floyd protest, right? So I wanted to speak out about this then but I didn’t feel like I could because Because I felt like it would fall on deaf ears and I felt like it would fall on deaf ears because I didn’t I I actually wasn’t speaking from the right place Speaking from a place of being feeling like You know, they’ve got it wrong, right? and so I thought So I was trying to understand like why? So if it’s true if my narrative is true that that’s not really a problem well, why are people so open to hearing that it is a problem? So It turns out that my My my grandfather was mixed race and he Um His family was from brisgiana And they came across ellis island and they were they were labeled as mixed race And then they passed right And he he he never would admit that he was portuguese Certainly not that he was part african And he actually threw people out of his house for for saying that he was portuguese. He threw my my so So my my my great aunt uh elinor she I think it was elinor she told My mom and her sisters that they were actually portuguese in the ancestry and they went and told jack my my grandfather That they had heard that and like why did you tell us we were english and he he he wouldn’t he threw them out Of the house he wouldn’t listen to that, right? So it turns out that when we trace the history of that family back Um, I think I think it was elinor my own my great aunt elinor she had married a mulatto man and He so she had basically Kind of lost contact with her family because of that then he had um That man had uh had a had a wealthy british father And he was he was raised in like an orphanage for For mixed race men who had wealthy british fathers and he he was trying to make contact with his father He wanted to be acknowledged by his father and eventually he was completely rejected And in response to that rejection He took a gun and shot himself in the head in front of his entire family And so his children were bathed in his blood and there’s like, you know media accounts of all of this So then His his wife now without support has to move to new york on her own with her children So then something happens with my great grandfather. We don’t even know we have no idea what happens, but his family Has to move to new york, too right and now My great aunt she she she’s in poverty and so she has to actually give her children up and my My my great grandmother She she actually has enough money left over from from whatever they inherited from their states they own sugar plantations in british guiana That she she has enough money to take care of the family but she refuses to To take care of her grandchildren because she doesn’t want people to know That she has mixed-race grandchildren and she doesn’t want people to get wind that her children are Are mixed race like that’s what we think happen. We don’t know exactly but this is the story, right? So then my my my father my grandfather grows up basically hiding who he is right my my my My great grandmother tells everyone that she’s that she’s from scotland right and Even though she has a caribbean accent All right, and then she but then you know, then there’s all this trauma in my family and all this neglect and abuse of the children sexual abuse and And I don’t know maybe that’s that stuff happens in everything But it’s possible that that’s part of their trauma of all these horrible things that happen them specifically because of their racial inheritance right, so now Play that forward so my mom, you know, she makes choices She ends up being blind to certain things certain things happen to me certain things happen to my sister right Well, you could You can’t know for sure but one potential causal factor is actually the history of racism yes, so that that ghost affects me as a You know middle-class white male in our society So if those intergenerational traumas are playing out in my life I can say well How are they playing out for people who it’s much closer for? Right and even if police are less likely to be lethally violent today How long has that been true? Yeah, how you did it to believe that it’s not true when it wasn’t true for your uncle? Yes, or your father And so I started thinking that This has to be acknowledged as part of the story right even if racism is not This is not the problem that is described as by critical theory the ghost of racism Still has massive implications on people who are living to this fair, you know to this very day quote deontay wilder yeah, i’ve been trying to advocate for this thing like Not talking so much about Systemic racism is talking about historical racism. Yeah as Again not to deny that there aren’t things going on here now because there are But to try and Say that people might be not just responding to synchronic factors They might be very well also responding and legitimately so to diachronic factors. Yeah I had this I had this idea that Like i’ve watched people go through grief And it’s not You don’t it’s not a linear process No, the force that that stage model is very It’s not supported by a lot of good empirical evidence, by the way like it’ll it’ll be gone for a while and it’ll come up and it’ll hit you and it moves in waves and all these things and I started thinking that like What we were seeing was a grief Was a grieving for the history of what had happened to african americans in this country. I think so and I guess why a lot of the responses took on A religious tone because religion has been generally a way in which we’ve tried to deal with deep grief a deep sense of suffering and grief. Yes and so So it’s like okay well So it’s partially let’s say grief grief on the part of african americans for what they’ve experienced and what People who are close to them have experienced and how that’s played out through the generations And maybe it’s grief on the part of white americans on the part that they played in that right as brothers in this nation um So I started thinking okay. Well Okay, there’s that and then and then I like I was also really thinking about um Peter turchins model, right? Peter turchin offers this model that that conflict in culture rises when you have a set of Economic conditions when you have relative immiseration of the poor overproduction of elites So you have lots of people who have phd’s now who can’t get jobs. Yes, right and also Increasing diversity, right? Yeah Jonathan pageau said something really recently that was really striking to me said that diversity without unity is death Right like when you when you break things apart into smaller smaller groups and you make Your group identity more and more salient without making the overarching identity salient The only direction that takes you is in the destruction of the overarching identity like we can’t we can’t Be african-americans and white americans gay americans and all these things and make the the not the american part less and less important Have america work That’s right Um, but on the other hand you I mean for peggio’s point, which is a good point There’s durkheim’s point which you know, you don’t want mechanical solidarity. You want it to do labor in society, right? So we you need this balance right? Well, it’s it’s your complexification model. Exactly exactly Bursification and unification Yeah, we need to be able to have our individual identity and we need to have it subsumed in these hierarchical identities And we need to work on how we better integrate all of those levels. Yes So anyway, so I was thinking about that and I was like And then there’s a technological element to this right I’m i’ve been a geeky person on the internet long enough that I remember when What became wokeness was largely contained on live journal and there was these incredibly toxic dynamics between like young adult authors Accusing each other of racism and sexism constantly on this one little corner of the internet And then live journal was taken over by tumblr and then it was like man Don’t go on tumblr and be part of these communities because these people are killing each other like they’re just absolutely talking to each other And then that was on twitter, right? Then it was all through college campuses And then it implodes and I think you know part of this analysis misses the point that I was making here Which is you know, this stuff has been the ideology has been propagating throughout the academia since the 1970s at least but But the technology Blew it up. Well and the adversarial algorithms, right and the adversarial algorithms. Absolutely So So this this is my model for for what’s happening right it’s not that Gramsci says do this and mark hussis’s do this and Crenshaw says do this and then it it just emanates down. It’s like There are underlying factors like grief like historical racism like elite overproduction and This and then there’s the technological factors and adversarial and all of those All those come together to create the potential for this configuration And so when we when we criticize postmodernism We have to elevate our analysis Beyond pointing the finger at postmodern neo-marxist Right and say what what is this overarching phenomenon if we understand it that way I think we have a much better Set of tools to actually address it right I i’m in complete agreement with that. I mean i’ve been I didn’t get a chance to make that move in the argument, but I was preparing for the argument of trying to resituate my critique in the contian sense of postmodernism back within the larger framework of the meaning crisis because that’s what I was And that what I see postmodernism trying to do is I I think it is both a symptom and a symptomatic response to the meaning crisis And trying to understand it through that lens has been What I what i’ve been trying sort of trying to argue towards uh here here today with you, um So I I agree with what you just said, uh, and Um, and i’m not saying the meaning crisis is the only bottom-up factor. I’m not saying that i’ve repeatedly said that by the way Right. All right. There’s all these other economic crises, you know, yeah Yeah, all of that all of that the meta crisis As thomas de jordan says, um, so Um, yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Um So I don’t I I would I don’t have anything to say in response to that move you just made other than and i’m sorry I hope this doesn’t sound sort of post facto. I was trying to argue towards That sort of thing right like can we yeah I think that’s a signal of of uh, it’s a it’s a sort of independent verification Yeah, right. It’s a signal that that um That the thought process i’m working towards is is validated by uh by somebody I do respect I mean I wanted to lay the argument out for you for how I would seeing the bottom-up aspect of it and get your Your take on it. Is there is there is there a factor of missed? Is there something that and then so there’s two questions, right? Is my now is my analysis of the factors solid and is there a way that that we can strengthen it and then If we understand that what does that actually tell us right? Like i’ve been looking at James lindsey and sam harrison’s are the people who’ve been sort of trying to argue against the woke And i’ve said like your logic is is is really strong and it doesn’t seem to be working Yeah, so I don’t I think that there’s another move that needs to be made and I think that that move That move has something to do with one empathizing which is like Okay Your your description of reality as systematically racist isn’t accurate But the emotional antecedents that that predispose you to it exists for a reason and that needs to be validated and understood Um and then My my pitch would be that fundamentally the the central problem that we have is that we have no system that orients us towards virtue And the develop and and tools to develop virtue and that in order to fix that In order to fix the problem That’s ultimately what it comes down to Well, that’s where i’m in complete agreement with you because I mean I was trying to say Maybe or maybe one way of interpreting it that’s converging with what you did is saying me trying to say For all of the the legitimate criticisms that can be made of post-modernism. I didn’t get a chance to make those but anyways, um It’s put its finger on the fact that we are in the midst of the hyper object of the You know the demise of modernism as that overarching unit unifying framework, that’s what gave us our common unity our community That’s what community means, right? Um, and so and that’s the meaning crisis. That’s what I know me that’s all you know, again, i’m not going to repeat arguments You’ve heard me make multiple times and so that’s what I meant when I tried to say it’s both a symptom of and an attempt to respond to because What it’s do it’s it’s it’s a symptom of the that collapse but its response is to try and accelerate the collapse And there’s a sense in which I can get that But your point is nevertheless well taken. Yeah, but accelerating the collapse. Yes, that’s that’s like, you know That’s like cauterizing the wound right? I like it’s like it’s probably yeah You’ll end the you’ll end the problem, but you won’t have you you’ll have left a deeper problem, which is the vacuum Wow And so there’s two things that i’ve been trying to argue again, which is the attempt to shore up Modernism and to try no, let’s get back to the enlightenment enlightenment now. No, that that’s not going to work uh but i’ve also like I also want to like Valorate valorize what you’re saying which is okay, but can we recover a worldview a A sense of wisdom and reason and virtue And meaning and meaning in life that is viable and it is an alternative to that That’s very much my project and that’s that’s the project you’re engaged in and so I try to engage with post-modernism in so far as It gives me tools for critiquing modernism and enlightenment Models of cognition and humanity and virtue And also but I also stepped back from it And follow another line That I indicated at the very beginning of our talk that went into right this new appropriation of reappropriation of plato And Sorry you were gone for there for a second. No, my camera just died. Oh, it lasts more than two hours Yes So and I said, you know and also the whole way this this neo-heideggerian phenomenology post phenomenology uh has Has come in there’s also a whole other thing that i’m actually deeply engaged in right now with dan chaffee Which is the whole move which is called speculative realism, which is the whole attempt to get outside of modernity’s way of doing epistemology and metaphysics Object oriented ontology Uh the new the new ways in which whitehead has now come back into prominence and is intersecting very deeply with physics And biology for e cognitive science. This is all this is to my mind where Right, we can move post post-modern if you’ll allow me to say that Yeah, yeah, and so uh i’ve been described Someone recently described me on twitter as i’m at a Who’s like he’s a movement teacher is a meta rationalist and regularly conversing with john revaki. It’s like, okay, I I I have not self described as a meta rationalist or Deeply engaged in in the conversations that call themselves meta rationalism, but it does make sense to me as a as a framework Yeah, and for me for me that’s You know, that’s the attempt to get back to what i’m arguing for it was the ultimately dialogical Uh nature of reason and that reason that the the deepest form of reason is not Consumptive reason it’s not even it’s not even communicative reason the deepest function of reason is contemplative What reason does? Is it is reason is ultimately about the the goodness of intelligibility? And the intrinsic goodness and it’s it’s it’s something you do for its own sake like the way you listen to music For its own sake because music reveals you to you the inherent goodness of your sensibility reason reveals to you the inherent goodness of intelligibility the intelligibility of the world and that has an inherent value for human beings And and that’s that’s that’s ultimately what’s supposed to be the compelling power of uh of uh of Reason that that’s heidegger’s notion of the alethetic notion of truth not correctness of propositions But this this this connectedness disclosure of this wheel is another greek word that you use can you remind me what that means? Oh alethia, so let’s say is the river of forgetfulness And alethia is unforgettable. It’s like the tonic remembering it is to so it’s the idea It’s the idea of it’s the kind of truth that is found within participatory knowing the truth that emerges in the that is Emerges with the intelligibility of the world and the relevance realization that that plugs into that Would you say that alethia maps somewhat well to the buddhist concept of awakening I think when alethia is properly functioning to orient perspectival and procedural and ultimately propositional knowing such as to Systemically and systematically reduce self-deception and afford enhanced Integration the world view when alethia if i’ll put it in a slogan with a’s when alethia affords anagoga That’s awakening When alethia affords anagoga that’s awakening sounds like a really strange pop song Um It’s like if if the beetles were uh were philosophers or more philosophical than they were Yeah, um I think we may have come to a good resting point for the discussion. Yeah I agree. I agree There’s more to unpack, you know you’re throwing things at me that are past my uh my current level of education, but uh Oh, I didn’t mean to do that. I I wanted to be fair. You know, absolutely Please don’t apologize. Um, it’s just you know, uh I I feel really happy with the level of of insight. I hope that I offer back And I feel like this was one of the most powerful dialogues There’s something valuable for me in in encountering the depth of philosophy that you have and I hope that as a as an eager student with a perspective that that um That’s rooted in in these other practices that offer expertise in I give something very valuable in return. You did totally and I appreciate it. I want to thank you for it. I mean I want like Having much more careful and wonderful conversations about you know postmodernism I think is Needed to get us to a place like I said where we can avoid the skill and correctness of deification and demonization um I I I really Skill and correctness are uh the guardians of the underworld, right? Well, they’re they’re they’re jason and the argonauts I believe was it a distance. I always get those confused. I think it’s just Yeah, i’m pretty sure and he’s sailing and there’s two monsters one on either side of the ship And the trick is to sail between the two monsters of skill and correctness So that you don’t get drawn down and and grounded destroyed, right relativism and Perennialism Yeah, I was gonna say, you know naive positivism right like or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, the world is is noble Absolutely Yeah as an unfolding mystery and I like hylens notion that we have to get back to the platonic socratic notion Of finite transcendence. We are finite beings and we will always be finite beings But we are finite beings who will always be capable of transcendence a transcendence It doesn’t make us non-finite But right and nevertheless a real transcendence and plato is trying to remind us of that and that that is what That is our dignity our nobility. It is it is how we are We properly accept our station um in in the cosmos So we never did get back to how post-modernism is impacting your understanding of play Of play-doh and how that’s valuable But I think that’s good because I think that it gives us uh another starting point for a new dialogue Yeah in that in that second dialogue we could also talk about connections between different ones and relevance realization I would really I would really like that too. That would be very very good and um One of my desires is to is to understand play-doh more deeply so if you could send over some resources for me to to start digging into um, because I know obviously he’s incredibly fundamental to your world view, but I haven’t read him And obviously it’s it’s fundamental to all of philosophy. So That’s kind of uh, it’s time for me to dig into that. I think so. I’d be happy to send you a A list of sort of the best books. Uh, uh Yeah, i’d love to do that Awesome. Well, thank you very much john. It’s always an incredibly insightful experience to be in dialogue with you and uh, It’s so very meaningful to me to have this conversation today. Well me too rick. Thank you. Thank you. I mean And I appreciate your generosity and your flexibility around this um And so thank you for that